Mastering: a new service

This is the much-discussed process of making your music sound better, bigger, louder, wider: with more 'presence', loads of 'air' and 'slam' . . . You get the idea. But of course the real world isn't quite like that. For one thing, the music has to be well-recorded and mixed. So, to the short blurb on mastering:

The mastering process includes:

Track-order. The relative volume between tracks. The length of the pauses (or cross-fading) between the tracks. The feel of the tracks - making your CD a cohesive whole. This includes tonal changes, level changes using an editor ... to get the feel of the intro, verses and choruses right, for example. Compression/expansion, adding reverberation, widening or narrowing the stereo width. All these things can make the music sound better, bouncier and more expressive. Putting the music in the right 'space'. If a mix is really good, then nothing needs to be done, apart from doing the compiling, sample-rate conversion and correct conversion to 16 bit with dither (for CD), and PQ and ISRC coding. Most of the mastering processing will be done in the digital domain, although some very good vintage gear is available on request.

There has been a recent daft trend to make CDs louder than anyone else's. Obviously, this can't happen forever, so now. . . they may seem a bit louder - but where has the music gone? These CDs can get pretty loud, but are without character. Well, any decent character, anyway. People often turn these CDs down as they are annoying and tiring to listen to, like an irritating fly in the room. A myth connected with this daft loudness-war, is that a madly maximized CD will sound "louder on radio." Well, it will sound horrendous! Don't forget that a well-mastered dynamic CD will be taken care of in the FM station's own loudness processors, which are designed to cope even with too-quiet demos, and make them nice and loud on the radio.

Codes. Mastering also includes producing a CD that can be sent off to the duplicating/pressing plant: PQ & IRSC codes.

AcousticRecord will master all tracks - be they singer-songwriter, classical, club, disco, jazz, rock, folk, speech.